Recently I got myself a Sun Blade 1000 workstation to play with. It has a USIII @ 900 MHz, 102 MB RAM and a PGX64 graphics card. However, most of the time it doesn't boot properly, and I can't get into the OBP (I have a serial console attached). One time when I got into the OBP, I got this out of it:

Well, the Sun Blade 1000 have a USB keyboard, so Stop-A doesn't work. Instead you have to press the power switch twice ("double-click") when the green light in it is blinking. Which is what I am doing. However, most of the time the only thing on my serial console is this:

Code:

Memory Configuration:
Segment @ Base: 0 Size: 1024 MB ( 2-Way)

And then it just sits there.
But I am still trying to get back into the OBP, I managed somehow one time, so it must be possible to do it again.

What are you using for a serial console? "tip" and "picocom" let you send a break which is what a stop A days. If you have a usb keyboard plugged into the machine, that will explain why you aren't seeing anything new on terminal.

So diagnostic mode can take hours to finish? Really?
Well, if so, this is the first machine with OpenBoot I have experienced which takes a significant amount of time to run / finish diagnostics.

Don't confuse diag mode with POST. Diag mode tests everything right down to cpu registers and it just takes for ever. A system will auto switch to diag mode after a few crashes / failed boots. You can't break from it unfortunately, you have to wait till its finished before you can break and do a set-defaults to clear the diag level.

If you can get boot enabled again using the asr-clear, you can do a "boot disk" to see if it will boot up. But you definitely have a bad stick of RAM (ECC errors). You could try swapping banks to temporarily circumvent the problem.

FWIW, i tried my RAM in the other bank (bank 1). As expected, it didn't help.
I also tried with only one or two RAM sticks in there, just to find out what will happen. If you try, the system warns you that memory is missing from a bank, then turns itself off. Useful to know.